


in faith

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mack loves Daisy, bisexual Mack, just a bunch of ridiculous mack and yoyo fluff scenes, mentions of Mack's unrequited love for Bobbi, not Lincoln friendly, past Mack/Tim, post-season 3, sad past headcanons, with apologies for my terrible spanish, yoyomack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 05:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7301305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mack & Yoyo spend a little time together post season 3, before the SHIELD shakeup means she and Daisy become fugitives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in faith

“ _Te ves bien_ ,” Mack greets Elena as he steps into her hospital room, and it’s true. She’s a sight for sore eyes.

Granted, she looks _small_ , wrapped in blankets on the metal-framed bed, but not as pale and sick as when he last saw her. The remaining SHIELD agents on base had gotten her here, into surgery, in good time.

“ _Estoy haciendo muy bien ahora_ ,” she answers, smiling up at him and gesturing to the chair beside her bed.

He takes a seat carefully, and then scoots closer, close enough that he can set his hand on the metal bar raised on the side of her bed, close enough that he _could_ touch her, but he doesn't.

“I know we must have won because everyone is alive.”

“Almost everyone,” Mack corrects her.

They bow their together about Lincoln. Someone like her; one of their own; it’s something they both need to do.

(Daisy doesn’t seem to be ready to mourn Lincoln, not aside from the tears of shock and guilt that she cried in the moment. Now, she’s back to isolating herself in the pod even though no one is making any pretense that she can’t leave whenever she damn well pleases. Talbot had asked whether SHIELD was really capable of containing her, and Coulson hadn’t even been able to hold back his smirk.)

“Lincoln died a hero,” Elena tells him, and he nods.

Fact is, Mack doesn’t have that much to say. He never liked Lincoln all that much, but Daisy did. And anyways, he won’t speak  ill of the dead.

But it’s true enough. The boy died a hero. Probably stopped Daisy from doing something stupid, too, and he’ll always be grateful at least for that.

“I could do with everyone being a little less heroic,” he admits, and ventures to touch her stomach softly over the hospital gown, just above the spot where he cauterized the gunshot wound.

“I think you chose the wrong job for that,” Elena teases gently, and he wonders how she can smile and joke through such pain. How she can be such a ray of light when everything seems dark.

“Probably,” he agrees, smiling up at her. And she’d say it’s blasphemy, maybe, but he can’t help that he thinks of her as a miracle, as proof of God’s will at work on Earth. That she exists at all, that she’s come through this still smiling. It gives him faith —  _she_ gives him faith — that maybe they can come through anything.

“I would do it again,” she tells him seriously.

 _Please don’t_ , he wants to say, but it’s pointless. They’re all big damn heroes, and he’s getting used to that fact.

“I know,” he says instead. “I would do the same for you.”

“You would _try_ ,” she shoots back, eyes shining playfully. “ _Tortuga_.”

“Turtle,” he repeats dryly as he raises an eyebrow at her, playing at offense he doesn’t feel. It makes her laugh, which in turn makes makes her wince in pain.

“No laughing,” she groans, and sets her hand softly on top of his, over her stomach. With her other hand, she taps a button to increase her pain meds, and then slowly relaxes under his palm.

“Should I leave you to rest?”

“No,” Elena sighs as she curls her fingers around his, even though he can see how tired she is in the way her eyes grow hooded and darker. “ _Quédate conmigo_.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Are we going back to the Playground?”

“No,” Mack shakes his head as he helps her out of her wheelchair. The hospital had required him to wheel her out this far, even though it’s meant Elena has complained the whole way that she’s _already_ spent _weeks_ on her back, and she’s _better_ , or at least he thinks that’s what she said.

(The hospital  probably should have kept her longer, but she heals faster than ordinary humans do, and they don’t need any more questions.)

“Why not?”

“Coulson thinks maybe it’s not the safest place right now.” Which is the reason they’d kept her here in the first place, instead of back home.

“Not the safest place for Inhumans, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“What about Daisy?”

“I don’t know, yet,” he admits. He doesn’t like this feeling of the way the wind is blowing, of Coulson’s increasingly tense meetings with Talbot, of the _list_.

Daisy has stayed put inside her self-imposed prison, but he gets the feeling that if she hadn’t chosen to stay behind glass, Talbot might push for it. At least this way, Mack has been able to go inside, and it’s not like anyone can monitor Daisy when she doesn’t want to be monitored.

“She’ll run,” Elena tells him, as though she’s seeing the future.

“What makes you say that?”

“If her choice is to obey Talbot, or to run, she’ll run.”

“You will, too,” Mack says.

“Yes. And if we run, then whatever happens is on our heads. Not on you or Coulson.”

“You’ve been thinking about it,” he half-accuses her.

“Of course I have been thinking about it,” she shakes her head. “I see the news. _No tengo otra_ , Mack.”

“ _Tengo otra_ right now,” he corrects her clumsily. “Coulson still has a safe house he didn’t tell Talbot about.”

It makes her smile.

“He always keeps, how do you say, _trucos en reserva_ , doesn’t he?”

“Tricks up his sleeve,” Mack nods. “It’s frustrating.”

“A  good thing, though.”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“So now, we are going to the safe house?”

And they’ll leave talk of running for another day.

“Yeah,” he agrees and leads her to a nondescript sedan. The other benefit of Daisy having chosen her prison is that it was really easy to get her a laptop, really easy to set it up so she could hack Elena’s medical records, hack the feed of the camera in the parking lot.

By the time they leave, they’ll have never been here.

He glances up at a camera, and Elena seems to catch on, waves happily at the device. He likes to think it makes Daisy smile.

“We have to stop at the store,” she tells him as she settles in. “So I can make us dinner.”

She’s been talking about real food for the past week. The hospital only just moved her to solids, and she’s complained about it constantly — _asqueroso, de mierda_ , _no aptos para perros_ — and some other things it’s probably better he didn’t catch.

“You’re not making us dinner. You’re hurt.”

“Do you cook?”

“Not well,” he admits. “My brother’s the cook.”

“Then I can tell you what to do.”

“I’m sure you can,” he half-laughs, amused at her ability to take charge.

She raises her eyebrows at him, a little challenge, and he wonders if it can possibly be right that he fell a little bit in love with her while he was still tied to a chair in Bogotá.

 

* * *

 

“First the rice,” she instructs, settling herself at the table just off the kitchen as he works his way inside. It’s very small, with really low ceilings he could easily touch, but it will work.

“ _Yo sé cómo cocinar el arroz_ ,” Mack tells her, almost confidently.

Elena laughs.

“Oh no. American arrogance.”

“It’s just rice.”

“ _Blasfemia!_ ” She cries, and he’s pretty sure she’s only half joking.

She narrows her eyes at him, and he throws his hands up, takes her careful instructions to prepare and then season the rice. She’s exacting about rinsing and measuring water, and it makes being in the kitchen with Ruben seem easy.

“More _comino_ , Mack. You’re being stingy.”

He raises an eyebrow at her and adds another sprinkle, then another. Then another, shaking the container almost defiantly as he meets her eyes.

“That’s better,” Elena nods, satisfied, and Mack can’t help his smile.

“I didn’t realize rice was such serious business.”

“ _Muy serio_.” She relaxes a little back into her chair as he sets about preparing the chicken. “When I was small, my cousins and I would all fight over who got to make the rice on Sundays. It was a big honor.”

“A right of passage,” he nods. “My brother and I were the same about helping dad on the grill.”

“But your brother is the one who cooks now?”

“Yeah. He’s really good at it. I just know enough to get by.”

“You were busy with other things.”

“There’s not a lot of time for cooking once you join SHIELD,” he agrees.

She nods, and he can guess that there’s not a lot of time for cooking when you’re trying to disarm the corrupt police who run your city, either. He can see it as her face grows more serious, more deeply considering as she looks at him.

“Why did you join SHIELD?”

“To protect people.” The easy answer. Also the true answer. “I was recruited out of my Master’s program, before I had decided what I was going to do with my degree, and the director, Nick Fury, told me that the point of SHIELD was to be a shield for whoever needed it, whether it was a country or a single man.”

“I like that,” she smiles into the words. “That’s what I wanted. To be the shield. _El escudo. Quería proteger a mi familia y mi país._ ”

“No more being _el escudo_ until you heal,” he tells her, or maybe begs her.

“ _Claro. Solamente descanso y relajación y_ Mack.”

Something in her voice, deep and promising, makes his cheeks heat up.

“We, uh, we can probably manage that.”

 

* * *

 

Dinner is nice, quiet. Not the kind of thing he’s spent a lot of time imagining for himself, especially lately.

But he and Elena have a lot in common, stories of close knit families and Sunday gatherings and making pennies stretch in hard times. He tells her about Ruben, and she tells him about Francisco, and it’s been a long time since someone opened up to him as freely as he opened himself.

It’s an obvious occupational hazard, he supposes, of living around spies. Not that he’d change it because having Bobbi and Daisy in his life, as his friends, as people he has loved with his whole heart, has been a blessing, even if neither of them is the type to freely tear down all their walls.

It’s just, the last person in his life who didn’t keep parts of themself safe behind walls was probably Tim. But he and Tim were engineers, not spies, they’d always joked.

And since Tim, it’s possible he’s been keeping his heart on the shelf, too, at least when it comes to...whatever this is.

If this is what he thinks it is.

(He’s almost sure they’re on the same page about what this is.)

“When was the last time you were in love, Mack?” Elena asks him quietly, and he smiles down at his empty plate.

“I loved Bobbi,” he admits, something he’s never exactly said out loud, even though he’s lived with it for years, burning somewhere in the background no matter what else was happening. Maybe he still loves her, will always love her. “I’m not sure if she knew.”

“Bobbi. Agent Morse.” He nods, watches Elena process this. “She is married?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah,” she nods, frowning like it’s very sad, and maybe it is. “What about someone who could love you back?”

He draws in a breath.

“Tim. He died. He...was shot. Trying to protect me.”

Her eyes get big, and he wonders if it’s the pronoun thing, if he’s shocked her, if he should have found a way to explain —

“I’m sorry I got shot,” she tells him instead, and he laughs even though his eyes sting.

“I don’t need anybody else dying for me.”

She smiles at him, but doesn’t make a promise that she probably wouldn’t be able to keep anyways.

“What about you?”

“Gilberto. We were engaged.” She goes silent for a long time, staring down at the table, and he almost doesn’t want to ask.

“What happened?”

“ _La policía_.” She drags her fingers under her eyes, and when her hand lands back on the table, Mack reaches across to touch her fingers. “Back then, I was not fast enough to stop a bullet.”

His heart catches in his throat as he watches her breathe deeply, her eyes closed against pain, and he grips her hand harder.  

“Come on,” Mack whispers, tugging her gently from her seat. “Let’s go sit down.”

Elena nods and follows him to the couch, lets him wrap his arms around her as she curls up against him. She feels good — warm, _present_ — and it’s an easy, calm silence that falls over them.

For the first time since The Iliad sank, he can imagine real love in his life again, and it looks like Elena curled into his arms, and it feels like her warmth seeping through his skin, and it sounds like her laughter.

“Will you stay here tonight?” She asks him quietly, her words buried in his shoulder.

“If you want me to,” Mack answers because he’s set up to do it if she wants, but he’s not come with much in the way of expectations.

“I prefer not to be alone.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

 

* * *

 

As Mack cleans up from dinner, Elena disappears into the bedroom to take a long, hot shower, to wash off the remnants of the hospital.

He’d brought everything of hers he could find, from both the Playground and the Cocoon. _Just in case_ , Coulson had suggested, but the ominous nature of that caution doesn’t fully strike him until he calls Coulson’s office to check in.

“Coulson,” the Director answers, and Mack can tell from the tinny sound of his voice and the echo behind it that he’s on speaker phone.

“It’s...me.”

“Agent Mackenzie,” Coulson greets him, almost managing to sound relaxed, but Mack can hear the way it’s forced, can practically make out the way his jaw ticks. (And he wonders when he got this good at reading the Director.)

“I just wanted to check in, sir.”

“Everything’s fine here,” Coulson tells him in a way that announces that everything definitely isn’t fine. “Are you enjoying your visit with your brother?”

“Yeah,” Mack answers, forcing the same easiness Coulson is, even though his heart is pounding too fast. “Yeah, Ruben’s doing real good. I’ll definitely stay the night. Maybe longer.”

“Good. Maybe that’ll make up for your vacation getting cut short before.”

“Yeah, but...you know if you need me, I’d be there.” He says it because it feels important, suddenly, that they all know that as hard a time as he was having after Bobbi left, he’s always part of the team.

He’s always Daisy’s partner.

“I know,” Coulson tells him, nothing fake about it.

“Would you tell Tremors...” Except he’s actually not sure what message he wants to convey to her, to Daisy who is still locked in her box, to Daisy who doesn’t need more of this shit in her life.

“I’ll let her know you checked in. I think she left you something in your bag.”

“I’ll...check that.”

“Talk to you tomorrow, Agent Mackenzie.”

“Yes, sir.”

Elena comes back into the room as he hangs up the phone, hair wet down her back, dressed in SHIELD issue sweats and tshirt.

“What’s wrong?” Her brow furrows as she watches him, and he can see her getting more and more nervous as she takes in his expression.

“I don’t know. Something big is happening.”

“ _Debemos ir a ayudar_!”

“No. _No es nada...hay...hacer...que_ —” He stumbles over his words and rolls his eyes at himself, at how much better she is at this. “There’s nothing we can do, Yoyo.”

“I could do _something_.”

“Even if you weren’t hurt, this is...politics. Coulson will handle it, whatever it is.”

She nods slowly, like she’s acknowledging that he’s correct, but she still disagrees.

Slowly, Mack makes his way to where his duffel sits on the couch, and he’s surprised to find more clothes than he’d packed for himself. Clearly Coulson had known something was going to go down, and Daisy’s been helping him plan for it.

He’s not sure whether he wishes he’d known.

Tucked underneath all the clothes is a SAT phone, a potential secure line for whenever Coulson can get in touch. Always something up his sleeve; Elena wasn’t wrong.

“I think he wants me to stay here, probably until things settle down.”

“So we are just...stuck here?”

“‘fraid so.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I need help with... _los vendajes_ ,” she tells him, holding up the gauze pads and antibiotic ointment they’d picked up from the hospital pharmacy.

“Of course,” Mack answers.

They’ve spent the last hour running circles around theories and suspicions, never quite naming what stands there like an elephant in the room: she and Daisy are probably going to have to run.

(He only hopes she can be _well_ before she has to run.)

Elena takes his hand and guides him into the bedroom, where she raises up her SHIELD t-shirt, holding it just under her breasts in order to reveal the remnants of her injuries. And he has a long moment where all he can see is _her,_  Elena, _Yoyo_ , showing herself to him in a way that makes his belly hot; it takes a second to focus.

“You healed _fast_ ,” he breathes when he’s finally able to zero in on the wound, and he can’t quite stop himself from brushing a finger just over the spot on her stomach where the one bullet managed to hit her.

“ _Las enfermeras_ , the...nurses…they said that, too.” She looks almost self-conscious about it, about her rapid — Inhuman — recovery.

“It’s a good thing.”

It definitely is. He’s seen enough awful gunshot wounds, had most recently been there for Bobbi’s recovery. And granted, Bobbi had been shot in the lung and the damage had been more severe (Elena managed to miss much major organ damage), but this wound is practically healed already.

“They also said that you saved me. When you lit me on fire.” She smiles into it, and he can’t quite contain his answering smile, even though he could pretty much go a thousand years without thinking about her like that again.

“It wasn’t me. If we hadn’t had…”

“But you were the one I trusted,” she tells him, setting a gentle hand on his bicep, and there’s a firmness to her voice that tells him to just accept her gratitude. “Because you are so...careful.”

The way she says it ( _careful_ ) with such reverence ( _careful_ ) makes it sound _sensual_ almost, and he can imagine kissing her bare skin _careful_ and running his hands down her body _so_ _careful_.

Instead, he pulls his hand off of her, his palm cold without her skin underneath it.

“Lie down?”

Of course, sitting beside her on the bed, leaning over her body and touching her naked skin feels intimate, like something he would do for a lover.

Yoyo isn’t his lover, though, and even if it feels like slow steps towards that wonderful inevitable, he has no intention of pushing or rushing.

He’s given plenty of medical assistance in his time in SHIELD, and he can be a professional. So he’s careful as he applies the cream and then the gauze, taping it in place with fingers that only shake slightly.

“Now my back,” Yoyo half-whispers, and flips herself over beneath him. Her shirt slips up further as she turns, and his mouth goes dry as he sees the side of her breast before she’s pressed into the mattress.

He’s careful again, delicate fingers moving over her back as he tapes the piece of gauze in place.

Once he’s finished, he traces his index finger softly along the edge of the bandage, a little surprised when Elena moans and arches into the touch.

“Keep doing that,” she whispers, her words barely audible through the pillow her mouth is pressed to.

He does, spreading his fingers to run slowly down her back, down soft skin that puckers with goosebumps under his touch, and he smiles at the way her breath hitches in her throat.

Her hair has mostly dried into fluffy waves, and he pauses just long enough to gather up the mass of it and slide it off to the side.

He’s not sure how long he spends just touching her, feeling the softness of her skin under his fingertips, just that eventually she begins to drop off to sleep under his hand.

“I’m going to go make up the couch,” he tells her quietly, one last soft stroke down her spine.

“The couch?”

“Yeah. I’ll sleep out there.”

Elena seems to snap right out of her sleepy stupor.

“That is _stupid_ , Mack. You are too big for the couch.”

She’s right, of course.

“Yoyo…” He exhales a breath.

It’s just that he’s still unsure about what the shape of things between them is, of whether it’s pushing things too much to get too close.

“We are both adults,” she points out.

“We are,” he agrees.

“So get in bed with me.”

She says it with a teasing smile, the way she has of making things seem easy and simple and simultaneously like a huge deal.

“Yeah, okay.”

 

* * *

 

 

She’s asleep by the time he climbs into the bed beside her, dressed in identical sweats and a t-shirt and keeping his distance, but of course he wakes up with his arms full of her, her back to his front.

His sleeping brain obviously doesn’t have the same worries as his waking brain, doesn’t know that it can be bad to rush things.

“Mack,” she murmurs as she presses herself back against him, and he can’t stifle the groan or the sudden need to push his hips against hers, to grind himself against her.

“Yoyo,” he whispers, shooting for _warning_ , but it comes out a lot more...needy. She hums a pleasant noise, a long low breath that he feels down his spine.

A moment later, her fingers slide through his in order to draw his hand to her breast. He traces his index finger in a tight circle over her cotton t-shirt, smiles into the top of her head as her nipple hardens under his fingers.

It’s when she pushes her ass back against him, moving with purpose, that Mack pulls back and Elena groans.

“Why are you stopping?”

“You don’t think we’re rushing?”

“Rushing?” She laughs into the word. “For _weeks_ , I have been waiting for you to kiss me.”

“You’ve been waiting for me to kiss you?” He raises an eyebrow at her.

“Well, why haven’t you?”

Mack blinks.

“I was waiting for a...signal?” Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe the answer is just that their lives are a little too hectic to wait around for a signal that it’s time to kiss. It’s not like he could have kissed her while Daisy was in danger with Hive, while he was struggling with his own crisis of faith, while she was bleeding out from the bullet she took for him, while she was in pain during her recovery.

“What kind of signal would you like?”

She rolls herself out flat on her back and looks up at him, something _come hither_ on her face, her arms stretched to the sides as though she’s making herself an offering.

“How’s that? Are you receiving my signal?”

“Yeah,” he exhales a silent laugh and slides towards her, props himself just to her side so he can touch her cheek softly. Her eyes shine up at him, dark brown tinged with gold, and he could fall in if he's not careful. But maybe he doesn't need to be careful.

As he draws a line down her cheekbone, her eyes drift shut, and when his thumb brushes over her lips, she kisses it, mouth pressed to his skin in a way that makes his whole arm tingle.

“You have turtle speed at this, too,” she complains softly, but she’s smiling at him as she does.

“You’ll like my turtle speed,” Mack promises, trapping her answering laughter against her lips when he leans forward to kiss her, finally. Finally.

And she’s right — it _does_ feel like he’s been waiting weeks and weeks for this.

 

* * *

 

 

They spend the day pretending the outside world doesn’t exist, like they aren’t waiting for a call that will change everything, that will mean this is all over.

 _Making up for lost time_ , Elena calls it when she pushes him flat on the bed and climbs over him, when they make love in the shower.

It’s all tinged with a shade of desperation, though; the desperation of two people pretending they aren’t living on borrowed time, and he can’t seem to make himself let go of her, even when she insists on making dinner.

Her head fits neatly under his chin, so she can almost lean back against him as she fries the brown plantains she had purchased the day before.

(“Real food, Mack,” she had sighed dramatically, as though she had to justify every purchase. As though he would have objected to her choice of comfort foods even if she weren’t planning her first real meals out of the hospital.)

“When are you going to take me to meet your brother?” She asks the question lightly in between poking at the slices of fruit in her pan, but it's a big question.

“You want to meet Ruben?”

“Of course,” she answers like it’s obvious, and he guesses it is. He’s not been terribly honest with his brother in the past — something he was obviously called out for — and he likes the idea of it, of bringing his girlfriend home.

“Soon,” he answers, pretending like they’re not already operating on borrowed time as he dip his head enough to brush his lips across her cheek.

“Will he like me?”

“Of course,” he answers automatically.

“Even though I’m…”

“Yeah,” he answers. And maybe he would have wondered before, but Ruben took a liking to Daisy, so of course he’ll like Elena, too. Anyone would take a liking to her. “Will your family like me?”

“I don’t have much family left." She says it like it's just a fact, not a cause for mourning, but he wraps his arms tightly around her waist in response. "My _tía_ will like you, though.”

“Yeah?”

“You are a good man,” she responds, and then tilts her head up so her lips make contact with his jaw. “And very handsome,” she murmurs there.

It makes him laugh, press his nose into her hair in his embarrassment.

“And that’s a good thing?”

She laughs and lays another kiss to his jaw in answer.

“My parents live down in Florida," he whispers. "I’ve been meaning to visit.”

“And you would take me?”

“Of course.”

And he will. There’s a part of him that knows he’s planning a future they might not get, but another — maybe bigger — part of him believes it. That he’ll build a new bike and take Yoyo to meet his family.

He tries to grab onto it, to hold some part of the faith he feels when she’s in his arms.

 

* * *

 

She has to run in the morning, before it’s even fully light. She’ll meet Daisy near the border, and then he doesn’t know what comes next.

(“The less you know, the safer you are,” Daisy had told him on the secure channel she set up, Coulson — just Agent Coulson, now — sitting by her side, obviously ready with more tricks up his sleeve.)

“I was hoping we would have more time,” Elena tells him, her forehead pressed to his chest.

“Yeah.” He traces his fingers softly down her back, over the gauze square he had applied. “Will you be...okay?”

“Yes,” she answers. “It’s better.”

And he’s so grateful for her fast healing, for the fact that it’s true. It truly is a gift from God; _she_ is a gift from God.

“Promise me… If you’re in too much danger, don’t...be a shield. Just stay safe.”

She smiles up at him, obviously touched by the sentiment, but makes no such promise because of course she doesn’t.

“You stay safe, too.”

Mack nods.

“I got you something,” he tells her and pulls out a jewelry box, something he bought while she was in the hospital.

Elena smiles, obviously aware of what's inside before he opens the it, but she still gasps when she sees it. It’s not ornate because he knows her. She’s like him, she knows that the power of the symbol is in its simplicity, but it’s heavier than the one that’s lost in space, obviously more expensive.

“This is too much,” she shakes her head, like she’ll reject it, and Mack smiles.

“A gift given in faith,” he reminds her.

“In what do you have faith, Mack?”

“In God. In Daisy. In you,” he answers. “That we’ll see each other again.”

“Yes,” she agrees, and takes the cross carefully from the box, lets him clasp it around her neck. “We will.”

 


End file.
